Daily Reviews for Feb 6

I remember looking at the original Midgard from Xigmatek and I even refreshed my memory by looking at the old review from 2010. As I remember, the original offered something like five ODD bays, five HDD bays with metal trays, seven expansion slots and a pair of orange bladed fans to go along with the tool-less mechanisms used in that chassis. One other thing I remember was that the original did have most of the front and the entire top covered with mesh for easy breathe-ability for both air in through the front. Via convection it allowed hot air to escape right through the top passively or you could add fans to help things along. All in all, for the time of its release, the Midgard had an oddly placed front I/O panel, but other than that it was a nice chassis for its day. As time progresses, older designs are left in the dust in favor of cases with USB 3.0, room to manage wires behind the motherboard tray and even handy hot-swap SATA hard drive docks built into cases are a huge hit. Well, Xigmatek saw the writing on the wall and took what was a good selling product for them and figured it was time to update the chassis to today's customers' expectations. With a fresh set of eyes, the new release got both an exterior and an interior redo. There are some subtle hints to the original case, but honestly it looks a lot like the mid towers we seen from BitFenix. Either way, the new chassis is a definite improvement over the original concept.

For the past several years, consumers searching through the available selection of Solid State Drive (SSD) storage devices have noticed that capacity continues to favor the hard disk drive counterpart. While it could be a few more years before any SSD matches terabyte capacity with the HDD, Intel's NAND Flash produced at 20nm is closing that gap in terms of price and storage space. In this article, Benchmark Reviews tests the Intel SSD 520 Series Solid State Drive against the leading competition to see if it's capable of delivering SATA 6GB/s speeds up to 550 MB/s and 80,000 maximum 4K random write IOPS.

Today I’ll be reviewing the BitFenix Raider ATX case. BitFenix has only been around a couple of years now, but has been churning out many great cases (such as the Colossus or Shinobi) at a frequent rate. This case is a mid-tower, in comparison so some of its bigger brothers, however I have high hopes that it will still meet the expectations of the BitFenix name.

Usually when a CPU cooler is reviewed here at the Shrimps we are talking about high end big and bulky models. Dual towers, triple fan equipped, the bigger the better. But what about for them that are building a high performance HTPC or eg a mini cube ? Do they have to rely solely on the included boxed coolers ? I had the privilege to build a Mine LAN PC inside a Lian Li V353 Cube shaped case. Most important factor was the build's size, not at the cost of performance. The choice of components was pretty high end : Asus Maximus IV Gene, Intel 2600K, 16Gb of Corsair ram, 120 Corsair GT SSD and a Nvidia GTX560 GPU. More than suitable for casual gaming purposes. After the build was completed, we noticed, during stability testing, that the CPU got pretty hot. And it was still running at out of the box speeds. Time to look for a beefier cooling solution Our eye fell onto Cooler Masters' latest low profile CPU cooler : The GeminII M4 CPU cooler.

Intel's high-end LGA2011 platform has been out since November 2011 and since the platforms introduction there have only been two SNB-E processor choices available, the six-core Intel Core i7-3960X and Core i7-3930K. These hexa-core processors are costly as they run over $600 and that is more than most want to spend. All that changes this month with the introduction of the Intel Core i7-3820 that is priced at just $285. Read on to see how this processor performs!

Prolimatech essentially combined a tower cooler and low profile cooler into one. It’s nearly an entire kilogram (800 grams to be precise) of aluminum dangling from your CPU socket. Once you attach fans to it, it can easily pass a kilo. So what does this mean to you? Two things really, the first is that without proper support, this much weight dangling from your CPU socket could cause problems. Fortunately the Genesis has a nice solid metal mounting system that holds it in tight and does a decent job of spreading the weight. It’s not as easy to mount as say a Thermaltake Frio, but the directions are clear enough that you shouldn’t have any issues.

For those that have the need for highly reliable, high speed LAN connections, as well as high speed WAN connections, the ASUS RT-N56U is your kind of router. The wired LAN connections are all capable of Gigabit speed transfers, while the wireless capabilities are equally impressive, featuring dual-band 5GHz and 2.4GHz speeds that can allow for up to 300Mbps concurrently.